Ara Dymond Surviving the Pinocchio Locomotive May 10 — Jun 21
New York

The language of Ara Dymond’s sculptures and tablets, while insistently mute, reflects the artist’s/protagonist’s futile cry “look mom” when pointing at an object in the museum. Unable to put in words his private, unique, singular and authentic mutual understanding between the work and the self, the protagonist begins to consider the sculpture a mirror image.

The condition of the artist, or child in culture as protagonist in potential narratives that have actually already been scripted, thought and learned before creates a critical tension between cinematic, or romantic behavior and life. That tension might be found in moments of elegant escapism in a city in which Dymond’s narrative takes place – the formal outcomes of its waste production, concentrated urban moments of disgust and attraction manifested in relics; The stain, the homeless object, the time of day, coatings, surfaces, shapes, dogs...are they trustworthy? This is the inventory of a day through Art Historical glasses while driving a car.

Allowing himself to be manipulated by the Canon of the Museum and returning these encounters to the world as sculptures and images, Ara Dymond questions the idea of Historical as Good, Antiquity as Quality, Design as Function and Truism as Truth. In Dymond’s animistic realm where signs sum up as a language that can’t be read, there surfaces a memory of an inability to communicate what felt like an authentic relationship between an object in a museum and a boy. Visitor Fascination.